Abstract

As humanities scholars increasingly recognize the value of public engagement, and as
the proportion of tenure-track faculty positions available to new graduates continues
to decline, many humanities programs are focusing renewed attention on equipping
graduate students for careers as scholars both within and beyond academe. To support
those efforts, the Scholarly Communication Institute has carried out a study
investigating perceptions about career preparation provided by humanities graduate
programs. The survey results help to create a more solid foundation on which to base
curricular reform and new initiatives by moving the conversation about varied career
paths from anecdote to data. The findings make it clear that there are a number of
effective interventions that programs can undertake. Many of the skills that people
working beyond the tenure track identify as crucial to their positions — things like
project management, collaboration, and communication — are also highly beneficial to
those working within the professoriate. Structuring courses and projects in a way
that emphasizes the acquisition of these skills not only contributes to the success
of students who pursue employment outside the tenure track, but also to the vibrant
research, teaching, and service of those who pursue academic roles. With the
availability of new data to work from and the recommendations above as possible
guiding principles, graduate programs have a robust set of tools available that can
help facilitate curricular assessment and new initiatives. As the importance of
assessing the effectiveness of existing structures and considering potential benefits
of reform continues to grow, humanities programs have a strong incentive to
demonstrate the ways that their graduate programs contribute to the vitality of the
university and the broader public sphere. Equipping graduate students with the skills
and literacies needed for 21st century scholarly work — from technical fluency to an
understanding of organizational structures — is critical to ensuring continued
rigorous and creative research, scholarship, and teaching.

Graduate students in the humanities thinking about their future careers face a
fundamental incongruity: though humanities scholars thrive in a wide range of
positions, few graduate programs systematically equip their students for varied
post-graduate opportunities. And yet, academic employment is an increasingly distant
prospect for many doctoral recipients, with a dwindling proportion of tenure-track
jobs available to an ever-growing pool of graduates. While the disconnect between the
availability of tenure-track jobs and the single-minded focus with which graduate
programs prepare students for that specific career path is not at all new, the
problem is becoming ever more urgent due to the increasing casualization of academic
labor — the shift from full-time positions to piecemeal adjunct positions, most of
which offer menial salaries, no benefits, and no job security — as well as the high
levels of debt that many students bear once they complete their degrees. At the same
time, people with advanced humanities degrees who find stimulating careers in and
around the academy but outside the tenure track are becoming increasingly open about
their experiences, as is clear from the vibrant activity on websites such as #Alt-Academy, Versatile PhD, and more [“#Alt-Academy” 2011]
[“VersatilePhD” 2010].

Despite the fact that many graduates continue to identify as part of the scholarly
world while pursuing satisfying careers beyond the professoriate, to date there has
been very little data available about this body of "alternative
academic" scholars — people with advanced training in the humanities who
do not pursue careers as tenure-track faculty members, but instead work in and around
academic structures in arenas like libraries, museums, archives, humanities centers
and labs, presses, and more. While graduate programs can help prepare junior scholars
for a much broader professional world than simply the professoriate, without robust
data it can be extremely difficult to make a case for changes, or even to know what
kinds of changes would be effective. To that end, the Scholarly Communication
Institute (SCI) has completed a study investigating perceptions about career
preparation provided by humanities graduate programs. The survey results help to
create a more solid foundation on which to base curricular reform and new
initiatives.

Given the limitations of previously collected data, SCI’s study is an effort to
provide faculty and administrators with the data they need to assess and strengthen
existing programs, to implement changes where appropriate, and to support efforts to
increase transparency regarding career preparation and post-graduate outcomes of
emerging scholars. It should be considered in conjunction with two complementary
elements of SCI’s most recent phase of work: meeting reports from a series of
workshops on reforming humanities graduate education [Rumsey 2013a]
[Rumsey 2012], and the exemplary models of innovative scholarly
training showcased in the Praxis Network [“Praxis Network” 2013]. With the
ongoing employment challenges for humanities PhDs in mind, and with an eye toward the
wide-ranging conversations related to careers beyond the tenure track, SCI’s study
uncovered patterns in the perceptions among humanities scholars and their employers
on topics such as career preparedness, skills and competencies, motivations,
performance, and more.

BACKGROUND

While tenure-track faculty positions remain the primary career goal of a large
majority of humanities doctoral students[1], the percentage of graduates that obtain tenure-track positions is
becoming ever smaller. The 2011 report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates indicates
that 43% of humanities PhD recipients have no commitment for either employment or
postdoctoral study at the time of degree completion [“Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2011” 2012]. As
the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) notes in their annual report
on the state of the profession, academic employment is increasingly shifting to
part-time and contingent positions, with 76% of all teaching positions being filled
by instructors in contingent roles as of 2011 [AAUP 2013]. This trend
means that proportionally fewer tenure-track lines are available to new graduates,
compounding the problem. Notably, a 2013 Inside Higher Ed
survey of chief academic officers reveals that provosts expect equal or
greater reliance on adjunct labor in coming years, and demonstrated little faith in a
continued tenure system [Jaschik 2013]. Given these realities,
continuing to view tenure-track employment as the sole expected professional outcome
for humanities doctoral recipients is untenable.

Reforming doctoral education requires a multi-pronged approach. We must at once
advocate for and work towards fair labor practices for contingent faculty members;
lobby against the trend toward casualization; and support graduate students in the
pursuit of more varied careers. Support entails not only opportunities for skill
development, but also greater recognition of what constitutes post-graduate success.
While earlier initiatives, most notably the 2000-2006 Responsive
PhD project, have also worked to shift university paradigms and encourage
better career preparation for graduate students [“Responsive PhD” 2005],
their resulting methods and recommendations have not been widely adopted. More
recently, the report of the Modern Language Association’s Task Force on Doctoral
Education offered a suite of strong recommendations on reforming the humanities Ph.D.
[“Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study” 2014]. The report is too new to assess uptake and
outcomes, but it signals the importance of the issue to the discipline as a whole,
and provides a useful starting point for discussions that can lead to real
action.

The fact that tenure-track employment opportunities are becoming scarcer relative to
the number of graduates does not necessarily imply that too many people earn PhDs, or
that graduate programs should reduce their admissions. Most humanities programs do
not need to be stripped down, but on the contrary, made more robust. Departments need
sufficient resources to allow them to invest in full-time employment lines and to
provide funding and support for graduate students. Reducing a program’s size can lead
to decreased funding, which may prompt programs to meet teaching needs by hiring
adjunct faculty on an as-needed basis as undergraduate enrollments continue to rise
([IPEDS 2009]; see [Laurence 2014a] and [Laurence 2014b] for data analysis). The casualization of academic
employment in the U.S. exemplifies a shortsighted view of the ways that labor
conditions affect student learning outcomes. The poor working conditions for many
adjunct instructors — who are stretched among multiple part-time contracts, with low
pay, no benefits, and few institutional resources — are directly and indirectly
passed on to students. Worse, in some universities, courses are so oversubscribed
that some universities, including the University of California system, are
entertaining proposals to shift many introductory courses to online environments run
by third parties — specifically, Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — leaving
students without the direct guidance, mentorship, or expertise of any instructor at
all [Fain and Rivard 2013].

Further, reducing doctoral programs in response to low tenure-track employment rates
strips other employment environments — whether scholarly, cultural, governmental,
non-profit, or something else entirely — of the advantages that deeply trained
humanists can offer. As Abby Smith Rumsey has argued, a broad range of opportunities
are available to graduates who look beyond the university, where many organizations
have a significant need for the skills and approaches that humanists could offer [Rumsey 2013b]. Humanities programs should not be sacrificed in deference
to problematic labor trends; rather, the moment is right to consider the value that
humanities education can provide in a broader range of roles that are more deeply
engaged with the public, and to encourage students to focus on new ways to engage in
public discourse.

Many positions that help to translate humanities study into a broader public good are
a part of the growing discourse of "alternative academic" careers,
often referenced by the Twitter hashtag, #altac (or #alt-ac). Coined in a 2009
Twitter conversation between Bethany Nowviskie and Jason Rhody, the phrase refers to
individuals with graduate training in the humanities who are off the tenure track,
while still working in and around academic and scholarly systems [Nowviskie 2012a]. Nowviskie went on to create #Alt-Academy, an online volume of essays treating a range of topics
related to the pursuit and development of these various careers [“#Alt-Academy” 2011].

The changing nature of career paths for humanities scholars is an issue of particular
concern to digital humanities practitioners, who have long been working in hybrid
roles that combine elements of traditional scholarship, like research and teaching,
with other elements, such as software development, librarianship, high-level
administrative responsibilities, and more. These roles are not new, but until
recently the scholarly community has lacked a satisfying way to refer to such
careers; they are now commonly discussed as #alt-ac roles. Many of the skills
implicit in digital humanities scholarship and work products — including
collaboration, project management, and technological fluency — are becoming
increasingly important in new models of graduate training, even among programs not
specifically allied with the digital humanities. The spheres of alternative academic
careers and the digital humanities can be best understood as a Venn diagram, with
significant areas of overlap as well as distinctive qualities. Many fruitful
conversations and initiatives related to broadening career paths have emerged from
the digital humanities community, and there are important reasons why this is the
case. At the same time, the two areas are not identical; many digital humanists work
as tenured and tenure-track professors, while many who identify as working in
alternative academic roles do not engage in the kinds of scholarship or practice
associated with the digital humanities.

While the scope of the alternative academic umbrella is the topic of a great deal of
conversation and some contention, it is also possible — and perhaps more productive —
to take a broad view that is defined not so much by the specific job or career, but
rather by a kind of approach. People that identify with the term tend to see their
work through the lens of academic training, and incorporate scholarly methods into
the way that work is done. They engage in work with the same intellectual curiosity
that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place, and applying the
same kinds of skills — such as close reading, historical inquiry, or written
argumentation — to the tasks at hand. This kind of fluid definition encourages us to
seek out the unexpected places where people are finding their intellectual curiosity
piqued and their research skills tested and sharpened.

METHODOLOGY: GOALS AND LIMITATIONS

In addition to the rich narrative material gathered at #Alt-Academy, several previous studies provide groundwork for SCI’s
recent work. In particular, the 2012 report by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS)
and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) titled "Pathways
Through Graduate School and Into Careers" provides a wealth of valuable
information [Council of Graduate Schools 2012]. As the CGS/ETS report notes, "the issue of career transparency presented the biggest gap in
data" from previous studies [Council of Graduate Schools 2012, 2]; the report
sought to correct that gap. An earlier study, "Ph.D.’s — Ten
Years Later"
[Nerad and Cerny 1999], explores the experiences of Ph.D. holders working in
business, government, and non-profits. It provides an incredibly useful baseline, but
data was gathered from 1982 to 1995, and no longer accurately reflects the current
academic or employment environments. Census data, such as the annual Survey of Earned
Doctorates, provides invaluable data on doctoral recipients and their work
commitments on graduation, but does not investigate the nature of that work, nor does
it track graduates’ careers beyond initial positions. While all of these studies
provide useful foundational information and analysis, they do not assess
finer-grained issues particular to the humanities.

A number of other projects related to the career prospects of humanities scholars
have been conducted in partnership with specific departments and graduate programs.
These include the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (2001-2005) and the Woodrow
Wilson Foundation’s Humanities at Work (1999-2006) and Responsive PhD (2000-2006)
programs. The Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate partnered with English departments
at four universities and history departments at six, each of which engaged in
specific interventions to their doctoral programs, such as revising curriculum,
increasing mentorship opportunities, rethinking the comprehensive exam, and more [“Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate” n.d.]. Humanities at Work provided practicum grants to doctoral
candidates, funded postdoctoral fellowships, and also established WRK4US, later to
become Versatile PhD. The Responsive PhD program partnered with 20 universities and
helped document best practices related to professional development [“Responsive PhD” 2005]. While all of these programs likely proved useful to
the specific departments and individuals involved, and perhaps more broadly through
retrospective reports and recommendations, their success is difficult to quantify and
therefore challenging to scale and replicate. Few of the programs involve even track
the career outcomes of their graduates, for instance, making it exceedingly difficult
to gauge whether the projects have had a lasting benefit. Further, the career-related
focus tends to be on PhDs working in "non-academic" jobs, a
problematic label that excludes or mischaracterizes the roles of people working in
hybrid roles within and around university structures. Finally, these programs, as
well as the studies mentioned above, have tended to focus on a narrow subset of
disciplines (often only English) as stand-ins for the full range of the humanities,
which gives an incomplete picture.

By focusing on a narrower segment of the academic population — humanities scholars
working outside the tenure track — SCI’s study can probe more deeply into issues that
concern that group. The study consisted of two main phases: one public, one
confidential. The first phase involved creating an exploratory public database of
self-identified alternative academic practitioners. The database was built within the
framework of the #Alt-Academy project in order to
leverage the energy of existing conversations. The second phase comprised two
confidential surveys. The primary survey targeted people with advanced humanities
degrees who self-identify as working in alternative academic careers, while a second
targeted employers that oversee employees with advanced humanities degrees. Because
we were working with a somewhat nebulous population, our subsequent distribution
focused on "opt-in" strategies — especially social media,
listservs, and traditional media coverage. While this method has limitations, we
hoped to learn something not only from the content of the responses, but from the
number and type of respondents.

The data obtained through this study represents an important step towards identifying
and understanding the career preparation needs of humanities graduate students by
examining particular issues facing the increasingly visible and vocal population of
humanities graduates in alternative academic careers. While we believe this data will
help advance the conversation related to graduate training in the humanities, we also
recognize the limitations of this study, which include the following:

An unknown population with undefined boundaries. The community of people
that self-identify as working in alternative academic careers is difficult to
define. Boundaries are porous, especially considering that so many scholars are
employed in hybrid roles, perhaps teaching a class or two in addition to
running a humanities center. Our priority was not to set boundaries, but rather
to identify and examine patterns.

Impossibility of achieving a representative sample. Our respondents cannot
be considered a representative sample, in part because of the difficulties of
defining the population. Aside from promoting the placements of those graduates
who find tenure-track faculty positions, most departments do not track the
career outcomes of their graduates, so we had no database or core population to
target. Instead, our work simultaneously helps to explore the range of careers
that people identify as alternative academic, while also surveying the career
preparation of individuals working in those positions.

Methodological constraints. Because of the difficulties related to the
population, as well as constraints on the timing and personnel for the study,
we relied on social media, crowdsourcing, and listervs to disseminate the
study. We cannot determine response rate, because we did not distribute the
survey to a known number of people.

Self-reporting. By design, the study examines the perceptions
of employees and employers regarding employees’ career preparation.
Self-reported results cannot be verified for accuracy. However, we hoped to
limit some of the bias inherent in self-reported answers by approaching the
questions from two angles, through the perceptions of both employees and
employers.

Despite these challenges, the data reveals interesting patterns that can help inform
the conversation. While the results cannot be generalized to the entire population of
alternative academics (in part because it is a fluid, loosely-defined community),
they can contribute to a more informed discussion and sound recommendations. They can
also provide a foundation on which to base future research.

METHODOLOGY: TEAM AND INSTRUMENTS

Dr. Katina Rogers, Senior Research Specialist at the Scholarly Communication
Institute, was lead researcher on the project. Oversight was provided by Dr. Bethany
Nowviskie, Associate Director, and Dr. Abby Smith Rumsey, Director of the Scholarly
Communication Institute. In consultation with Dr. Nancy Kechner, ITC Research
Computing Consultant at the Scholars’ Lab, Rogers developed an 89-question instrument
for employees, and a 24-question instrument for employers. The instruments include
multiple choice, Likert scale, and open-ended questions, and include branching
structures. The instruments underwent several rounds of testing in order to
strengthen and optimize them.

The surveys were opened to the public on July 10, 2012, and were closed on October 1,
2012. In total, we obtained 773 responses to the main survey, of a total of 938
surveys started, for a drop-out rate of 17.6%. The most common disciplinary fields
were English (19.6%) and history (18.51%), with a wide range of other disciplines
represented in small numbers. On the employer survey, 73 responses were obtained, of
a total of 103 surveys started, for a drop-out rate of 29.1%. Respondents were
permitted to skip any questions that they did not wish to answer. The high number of
responses enables us to determine meaningful trends within the data, in order to make
recommendations to humanities programs and centers wishing to modify their curricular
offerings.

Because we were working with a category of employment that is defined only loosely,
and because we hoped that the survey results would help to clarify what people mean
when they talk about "alternative academic" careers, it was
important to us not to be too prescriptive in determining who was and was not
eligible to participate. By allowing some flexibility, we hoped that in addition to
the data obtained from the responses themselves, we might also learn more about how
the broader community thinks about career paths beyond the tenure track. For this
reason, we left the parameters loose. The public database of people who
self-identified as working in alternative academic careers, which we developed in the
first phase of the study, provided an initial pool of approximately 250 potential
respondents. We then disseminated information about the survey through social media,
professional societies, relevant email distribution lists, an independent write-up in
the Chronicle of Higher Education
[Cassuto 2012], and discussion at pertinent meetings and
conferences.

The study is neither longitudinal nor a comprehensive look at a single cohort;
rather, it provides a starting point for understanding the current state of affairs.
As such, the data it provides is fundamentally different from long-running annual
studies like the Survey of Earned Doctorates. We hope that other studies will build
on the work we're doing now; to that end, the datasets are publicly available for
further analysis and extension [Rogers 2013a]
[Rogers 2013b].

FINDINGS

The general contours of the findings make it clear that people tend to enter
humanities graduate programs expecting to become professors; they receive very little
advice or training for any other career; and yet many different circumstances lead
them into other paths. Examining the specific data more closely helps to ground
general or anecdotal impressions in a more substantial foundation.

One salient fact can be seen in the response rates themselves. The main survey
received approximately ten times more responses than the employer survey. There are a
number of possible reasons that this would occur; employers have multiple demands on
their time, for instance, and unless they routinely hire people with advanced
humanities degrees, they may not perceive enough potential return on the time they
would invest in completing the survey. Beyond practical reasons for the difference,
the fact that such a broad gap exists between the numbers of respondents to the two
surveys also suggests mismatched incentives between the two groups. The motivation
for an employer to complete the survey, compared to that of a former graduate student
in an alternative academic position, is very different. While employed scholars are
invested in the outcome of the study because it promises to affect the paths of
people who take similar paths, employers do not have such a clear reason for
investment in the study. If humanities PhDs have inadequate training for a position,
an employer will simply hire someone better suited to the job. Those embedded in
humanities programs may see the value of hiring humanities PhDs in varied lines of
work, but this value is often not well articulated, either because stakeholders do
not perceive this to be a critical aspect of their roles, or because they face too
many competing demands to devote the time necessary to make the case. Leaders in the
humanities community face increasingly heavy burdens related to funding, staffing,
and other resource-related questions. Further, departments and centers embedded
within university structures are slow to change, making it difficult for otherwise
interested individuals and groups to embrace recommendations.

The low response rate from employers forces us to think even more deliberately about
the points of leverage not just in graduate preparation, but also in the employment
opportunities available to graduates. Certain areas have a well-established track
record of employing humanities grads, while others do not. Funders (especially the
Mellon Foundation) and para-academic organizations (such as the Council on Library
and Information Resources, and the American Council of Learned Societies) have worked
to incentivize employers to hire PhDs, often through the creation of short-term
fellowships and post-docs. In theory, post-doctoral programs that place graduates in
public humanities positions could enable employers to realize the value of making
this type of hire, making it more likely that they would continue to seek out similar
candidates for long-term employment after the conclusion of the funding period. In
practice, however, there is not yet data to support this desired outcome. Further,
post-doctoral roles may put graduates in difficult situations due to their duration,
funding structure, and often insufficient mentorship [Brown 2011]
[Posner 2012]. While post-doctoral positions have long been a standard
component of career paths in many STEM fields, they have not traditionally been
required for humanists; their growing prominence creates the risk of
"credential creep" as hiring committees seek candidates with an
increasing range of degrees and skills [Gailey and Porter 2011]. Nonetheless,
despite the legitimate concern that encouraging graduate students to pursue more
varied lines of employment pushes them into short-term positions with unstable
funding, in fact relatively few respondents to the primary (employee) survey report
this as their situation, with only 18% in positions funded wholly or partially by
grants (see Figure 1). Even fewer are in positions with
specified end dates (see Figure 2).

When graduate students begin their studies, their career expectations remain strongly
aligned with the goal of becoming faculty. Asked to identify the career(s) they
expected to pursue when they started graduate school, 74% of respondents indicated
that they expected to obtain positions as tenure-track professors (see Figure 3). That response far outpaces any others, even
though respondents could select multiple options (note that this is why the results
add up to more than 100%). Instead of working as faculty members as they had
anticipated doing, respondents reported working in a number of different types of
workplaces, with a large majority working within universities, libraries, and other
cultural heritage organizations (see Figure 4).

What is perhaps more interesting is these respondents’ level of confidence: of the
74% anticipating a faculty career, 80% report feeling fairly certain or completely
certain about that future path (see Figure 5). These
numbers are particularly striking given that because the survey targeted alternative
academic practitioners, virtually none of the survey respondents are tenured or
tenure-track professors; they are all working in other roles or domains. It is worth
recalling that respondents were reflecting on and reporting impressions they had
prior to beginning their graduate study. The time span is broad, with entrance years
for those who completed the PhD ranging from 1962 to 2008. While this range means
that the results do not show a contemporary snapshot, they do give us a clear sense
of the landscape over time. As such, it is clear that even among the body of people
who are working in other roles, the dominant expectation at the outset of graduate
school was for a future career as a professor.

These expectations are not at all aligned with the realities of the current academic
job market, and they haven’t been for some time. The labor equation for university
teaching has shifted dramatically in recent years, with non-tenure-track and
part-time labor constituting a strong majority of instructional roles [AAUP 2013]. The data shows that historically, many graduate students
have begun their studies without a clear understanding of their future employment
prospects. While the degree of transparency about the likelihood of obtaining a
tenure-track position may have improved in recent years, overall the responses signal
that we are failing to bring informed students into the graduate education system.

Deepening the problem, students report receiving little or no preparation for careers
outside the professoriate during the course of their studies, even though the need
for information about a variety of careers is acute. Only 18% reported feeling
satisfied or very satisfied with the preparation they received for alternative
academic careers (see Figure 6). The responses are
rooted in perception, so there may be resources available that students are not
taking advantage of — but whatever the reason, they do not feel that they are being
adequately prepared. That perception reveals significant room for improvement
throughout the higher education system. Further, if programs devote time and funding
to resources for career preparation, it is essential to offer and promote them from
the very beginning of graduate students’ careers. Failing to do so may limit the
effectiveness of such interventions.

The reasons that people pursue careers beyond the tenure track are varied and complex
(see Figure 7). Location tops the list, which makes
sense as a contrast to the near total lack of geographic choice afforded by academic
job searches. Beyond that, people report pursuing non-faculty jobs for reasons
ranging from the practical and immediate — salary, benefits, family considerations —
to more future- and goal-oriented reasons, such as the desire to gain new skills,
contribute to society, and advance in one’s career. The open text responses reflect a
wide variety of reasons for taking a position. The desire for greater freedom than
they perceived a faculty position might offer, or simply a different environment than
a university department, appealed to many. One respondent cited the prospect of
"An interesting job in a field where wide-ranging intellectual
curiosity is an asset" to be a very important reason for pursuing the
career that he or she chose. Another mentioned the "tremendous
autonomy" their chosen position offered. Much more simply, though, a large
number of respondents cited the need to find a stable job as their primary
motivation. Some respondents considered themselves "overwhelmed,"
"burned out," or "frustrated"
[Rogers 2013a]. A note of urgency and, sometimes, desperation came
through in a number of these responses.

The survey results make it clear that the varied careers of humanities scholars
require a broad range of skills, some of which vary by position, while others are
common across multiple sectors (see Figure 8). Some of
the skills listed are core elements of graduate work, such as writing, research
skills, and analytical skills. Keeping in mind that the employer sample was quite
small compared to the main sample, it is worth noting that both groups value many of
the skills at similar levels; however, there are a couple of discrepancies. First,
employees tended to undervalue their research skills relative to employers. There are
several possible reasons for this: first, there may be some activities that employees
do not recognize as research because it leads to a different end result than they
might expect, such as a decision being made, rather than a journal article being
published. Second, research may be a skill that has become so natural that former
grad students fail to recognize it as something that sets them apart in their jobs.

On the other hand, employees tended to overvalue the importance of project management
among the competencies that their jobs required. That said, project management
actually tops the list of areas where humanities-trained employees needed training,
according to employers (see Figure 9). This suggests
that employees overvalued the skill because they found it to be a challenging skill
that they needed to learn on the job. Employers also cited technical and managerial
skills as areas that needed training. While the importance of those two skills would
certainly depend on the type of position, others, such as collaboration, are useful
in almost any work environment. Even simple things, like adapting to office culture,
can also prove to be surprisingly challenging if graduates have not had much work
experience outside of universities.

The good news is that all of the elements that make stronger employees would also be
greatly beneficial for those grads that do go on to become professors. By rethinking
core curricula in such a way that students gain experience in things like
collaborative project development and public engagement, departments would be
strengthening their students’ future prospects regardless of the paths they choose to
take. While students are generally well prepared for research and teaching, they
aren’t necessarily ready for the service aspect of a professorship, which
incorporates many of the same skills that other employers seek. Collaboration and an
understanding of group dynamics, for instance, would help committee members to work
more effectively together. Many of the skills also contribute to more creative
teaching and research. Better project management skills would help faculty to make
good use of sabbatical years and to balance the anticipated fluctuations in workload,
while technological skills would lead to new kinds of assignments in the classroom
and new research insights. And yet, these skills are not typically taught as part of
the graduate curriculum. Methods courses, which could be used as an opportunity to
introduce students not only to the critical skills and approaches they will need, but
also to key issues of professionalization and post-graduate realities, are
inconsistent and sometimes completely absent, with 28.6% of respondents reporting
that their programs offered no methods courses whatsoever.

It is not surprising that employers find that humanities-trained employees need to
develop in new skills like project management and collaboration. Employees themselves
also recognize that these are by and large not skills that they acquire in graduate
school (see Figure 10). Skills like collaboration,
project management, interpersonal skills, and technical skills are all valuable in a
range of career paths that attract humanities scholars, but graduate programs do not
typically prepare their students in these areas. Even among those who felt that their
skills in these areas were strong, they noted that they gained them outside of their
graduate program — for instance, through jobs or internships. Graduate programs could
include opportunities to learn and apply these kinds of skills by partnering with
organizations willing to host interns, or by simulating a work environment through
collaborative projects with public outcomes (see the Recommendations section for more
concrete ideas).

At the same time, graduate students may describe their skills using vocabulary that
does not resonate outside of academic circles, making it challenging for graduates to
translate their abilities into aptitudes employers seek. One aspect of career
training that would be beneficial to graduates is learning how to recast their
skills. For instance, a dissertation may be more interesting to a potential employer
if it is framed as a complex, long-term project involving research, written and oral
communication, and a series of deadlines completed on time. Further, the core skills
of graduate training — especially research, writing, and analytical skills — are
highly valuable to employers, and often enable employees to learn new skills quickly.
Notably, regardless of respondents’ primary responsibilities, many reported that they
still engaged in some type of research or teaching. Just over half of respondents
(51%) continue to teach in some way, while an even greater proportion, 68%, perform
research as a part of their job. Many (61%) also pursue these activities outside
their position.

Respondents noted that in their roles, teaching and research often differ
significantly from the usual forms they take in academic settings, and are frequently
much less formal. Activities that feel much like teaching may be described as
presentations, mentorship, and even management. Research may be fast-paced, requiring
that one seek out and synthesize information quickly in order to facilitate
decision-making. By understanding these differences, graduates can better prepare
themselves not only to be competitive candidates, but also to succeed in varied
workplaces. Because the processes and products of skills like teaching and research
can seem foreign in new employment environments, it is critical that students don’t
undervalue (or insufficiently articulate) the ways that graduate study equips them
for other roles, particularly in the methods and generalized skills that can be
broadly applied.

Figure 10.

RECOMMENDATIONS

It seems clear from the findings that the persistent myth that there is only a single
academic job market available to graduates is damaging, and extricating graduate
education from the expectation of tenure-track employment has the potential to
benefit students, institutions, and the health of the humanities more broadly.
However, as long as norms are reinforced within departments — by faculty and students
both — it will be difficult for any change to be effective.

Despite that challenge, there are a number of effective interventions that programs
can undertake. There is significant room for improvement in career preparation
strategies within humanities curricula that will not sacrifice disciplinary rigor or
depth. Many of the skills that alternative academics identify as crucial to their
positions — things like project management, collaboration, and communication — are
also highly beneficial to those working within the professoriate. Structuring courses
and projects in a way that emphasizes the acquisition of these skills contributes not
only to the success of students who pursue employment outside the tenure track, but
also to the vibrant research, teaching, and service of those who pursue academic
roles.

Consider evaluating and modifying required aspects of
master's- and doctoral-level curricula in favor of including courses that
help students to prepare for the wide-ranging career paths that they may
pursue upon completion.

This is not to say that graduate programs should become vocational training
grounds; rather, this recommendation encourages programs to reconsider the
ways in which they currently train graduate students for a single career
path — that of the professoriate — and instead broaden the scope of training
in order to reflect more accurately the post-graduate realities of their
students. Incorporating such training will better equip students for any
career — including the professoriate — without detracting from more
traditional methodological training. In fact, done well, helping students to
learn some of the critical skills highlighted by the survey can actually
deepen their grasp of standard disciplinary methods.

Rethink standard methods courses to structure them around
a collaborative project in which students must apply a range of skills
toward an end goal centered on methodological understanding.

Such a project would not only guide students towards the disciplinary
framework that they will need throughout their degree program, but would
also enable them to learn and apply skills that will improve their research
skills and future employment prospects. Bethany Nowviskie has written
compellingly on the topic of rethinking methods courses, and the Praxis
Program that she leads at the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, while
extracurricular in nature, is an exemplary illustration of how successful
such a reformulation can be [Nowviskie 2012b]
[Nowviskie 2012c]. Good data management habits, project
planning, collaboration skills, and more will have immediate value as well
as future value.

Create one-credit courses that center on ecosystems
crucial to the academic landscape, such as scholarly publishing.

Graduate students wishing to pursue an active research career will benefit
with a greater understanding of traditional and emerging publishing options,
and best practices for planning, research, writing, and submitting scholarly
articles. Students uncertain about what career they wish to pursue, or those
explicitly interested in alternative academic career options, will also
benefit with a greater understanding of the research and publication
environment, a sense of existing platforms and opportunities for new
developments, and a deeper understanding of broader academic structures,
which many employers and employees have noted is valuable.

Form more deliberate partnerships with the inter- and
para-departmental structures — either within or outside their home
institution — that are already engaging in this kind of work.

Humanities centers have jump-started excellent training programs, research
projects, and public-facing work. For example, under the direction of
Kathleen Woodward, the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University
of Washington offers a cross-disciplinary Certificate in Public Scholarship,
numerous fellowships, and a slate of public programing; the center has also
cultivated numerous campus-community partnerships [“Simpson Center for the Humanities” 2013]. The reports from SCI’s meetings on graduate education reform highlight a
number of similarly strong examples, as well as future possibilities [Rumsey 2013a]
[Rumsey 2012]. Departments that would like to move in similar
directions can model the kinds of programs being offered by these centers,
and might also consider pursuing inter-institutional collaborations as
appropriate. There may be valuable opportunities to share infrastructure
(physical and digital), expertise, time, and funding across multiple
institutions, as a new partnership between Hope College and Michigan State
University demonstrates [Pannapacker 2013a]. Departments,
libraries, and centers should model the best practices they hope to teach to
their students: collaboration, equal credit, public engagement, and
transparency.

Cultivate partnerships with the public sphere, both to
provide graduate students with valuable experience and exposure, and to
make a clearer case for the public value of humanities
education.

Many respondents cited an internship or previous employment as crucial to
their current position, yet graduate programs more often encourage students
to remain cloistered within the confines of the department. Departments
could build alliances with local cultural heritage organizations in their
city or town — museums, libraries, archives, etc. — and work with students
to engage with those partners either through their research, or through
short-term employment or internships.

Encourage (and provide funding for) students to become
members in relevant professional associations, even if the students do
not intend to pursue careers as faculty.

Professional associations can provide useful opportunities for networking
and professionalization that extend beyond the limitations of an individual
department. Some, such as the American Alliance of Museums or the American
Association for State and Local History, offer professional development
opportunities more specifically geared toward careers in various realms of
public humanities.

Work to expand the understanding of what constitutes
scholarship.

Rather than evaluating students exclusively on their writing, encourage
faculty to develop collaborative project assignments that allow students to
work together in a variety of roles and to communicate their findings to an
array of expected audiences. Training faculty in how to evaluate such work
is critical, and can be challenging, especially where digital work is
concerned. Tools such as the guidelines developed by the Modern Language
Association can help facilitate the process of making different kinds of
scholarship legible to evaluators [“Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media” 2012].
Departments should also lobby for the acceptance of non-traditional
dissertations that allow students to assemble and present their research in
a way that makes sense for their future goals, and for the nature of their
particular project.

Graduate departments should critically examine the kinds
of careers that they implicitly and explicitly promote, and consider ways
to increase the visibility of the varied paths that scholars
pursue.

One way to do this is to compile lists of people working within the
university system that hold advanced degrees, so that students can see
potential paths and make useful connections. Stanford has taken positive
steps in this direction by listing staff members that are willing to serve
as mentors to humanities doctoral students, and by developing a speaker
series to highlight the varied careers of these members of their community
[Stanford University 2012].

Make a much stronger effort to track former students
(including those who may not have completed a degree), and to encourage
current and prospective students to connect with former
students.

At present, very little data is available from departments about the career
outcomes of their graduates [Pannapacker 2013b]. While 85% of
graduate deans reported dissatisfaction with the success of tracking former
students, and cited lack of current contact information as the greatest
hindrance to such tracking, research by a third-party consultancy, the Lilli
Research Group, has shown that it is possible to determine the professional
outcomes of graduates with a surprising degree of accuracy using only public
records [Wood 2012]. Along the same lines, the Chronicle of
Higher Education has launched a new initiative, called the PhD Placement Project, to seek new ways of
collecting and disseminating this information [“Ph.D. Placement Project” 2013]. While social media can provide a surprising amount of information about
former students’ current careers (c.f. [Patton 2012]),
concerted efforts from departments and professional organizations are
critical to standardizing the process to make it easier for prospective
students to compare results across institutions. Robust, standardized
tracking would also make it possible to compare the results of different
kinds of programs in order to better evaluate the effectiveness of new
models.

Implementing the kinds of changes described here will undoubtedly be challenging.
Many programs face severe budgetary limitations, and simply do not have the funding
needed to explore new projects. Faculty members may lack the time or incentives to
take on leadership roles or develop new curricula, or may not have expertise in the
areas where a department wishes to grow. Similarly, graduate students may know of
opportunities that they’d like to pursue, but may lack funding for them, or may be
unable to add additional commitments to an already overextended schedule. Both
students and faculty members may perceive a risk in exploring opportunities outside
the department’s standard fare. The structures of hiring, promotion, and tenure often
do not reward risk-taking of this nature, and students or faculty who do pursue
nonstandard opportunities may be called upon to do additional labor to make their
work legible to colleagues and evaluators.

Even though these difficulties are very real, a number of programs have taken
positive steps toward change and can be looked to as models. As a counterpoint and
illustration to the survey data, SCI has recently launched another project that we
hope will be a useful complement to the study: the Praxis Network [“Praxis Network” 2013].[2] The Praxis Network is a new showcase
of a small collection of programs that offer new approaches to methodological
training. Each of these programs can be thought of as one possible response to the
question of how to equip emerging scholars for a range of career outcomes without
sacrificing the core values or methodologies of the humanities, and without
increasing time-to-degree. The goals of each are student-focused,
digitally-inflected, interdisciplinary, and frequently oriented around collaborative
projects and public engagement. They share similar goals but different structures.
Because most of the programs are relatively new, it is too early to provide data on
graduate outcomes. So far, however, students who complete the programs do appear to
be highly competitive for the roles that they pursue, with some graduates working in
university libraries, software companies, and as faculty members.[3]

Other innovative programs are emerging and growing at a wide range of institutions.
For instance, the Digital Humanities Summer Institutes, started in 2001 at the
University of Victoria, offer weeklong courses in topics related to the digital
humanities [“Digital Humanities Summer Institute” 2014]. The DHSI model, which has recently expanded to
other institutions around the world (currently in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada;
Leipzig and Paderborn, Germany; Beirut, Lebanon; Bern, Switzerland; Oxford, UK; and
Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.), offers those within the communities of humanities
scholars an opportunity to develop new skills as peers. A number of consortia are
developing as well, such as Humanities Without Walls, which will connect scholars at
fifteen research institutions in the Midwest to facilitate collaborative research and
offer career-related workshops to pre-doctoral students interested in careers beyond
the professoriate [“Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities” 2014]. The appendix of the Report of the
MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature [“Report of the Task Force on Doctoral Study” 2014] profiles a number of other innovative doctoral programs,
all of which offer compelling models.

Some of these programs are fairly small and competitive, which has several
advantages: students benefit from strong mentorship and close collaborations with one
another when working in small cohorts. Some are extracurricular, and are housed
outside of departments (for instance, in libraries or humanities centers), which can
allow for greater flexibility and interdisciplinarity. Now that we have the benefit
of more data, however, we believe that incorporating elements of this type of
training into the structure of departments themselves is an important move,
especially in terms of sustainability (gaining a hard budget line, rather than
operating solely or primarily on grant funding) and in terms of access (ensuring that
all graduate students benefit from the training opportunities).

CONCLUSION

With the availability of new data to work from, the Praxis Network programs to use as
inspiration or models, and the recommendations above as possible guiding principles,
graduate programs now have a robust set of tools available that can help facilitate
curricular assessment and new initiatives. With increasing pressures from many
university administrations to evaluate effectiveness and to consider what new models
might be in the long-term interest of an institution, humanities programs have a
strong incentive to demonstrate the ways that their graduate programs contribute to
the vitality of the university and the broader public sphere. Humanists should be
making a case for effective modes of engaging with new technologies and new skills,
or that role may be entrusted to private corporations that lack a clear interest in
the sustained vitality of higher education.

While the recommendations outlined in this report represent important steps to take,
they represent only a small element of a much broader picture of higher education, in
which a great many issues must be addressed simultaneously, as Michael Bérubé has
convincingly argued [Bérubé 2013]. Poor labor conditions for many
part-time and contingent faculty members, an average time to degree of nearly a
decade [“Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2011” 2012], and increasingly burdensome levels of student
debt are problems that should concern people committed to humanities education,
whether they work in universities, cultural heritage organizations, or elsewhere.
Further, as modes of scholarly production and authoring continue to shift, the
standards for evaluating scholarship for purposes like hiring and promotion must be
reassessed. The health of humanities education affects the preparedness of future
faculty and staff; the perceived public value of the discipline; the quality of
humanities research and other work products; and much more.

Equipping graduate students with the skills and literacies needed for 21st century scholarly work — from technical fluency to an
understanding of organizational structures — is critical to ensuring continued
rigorous and creative research and other work products. Remaining wedded to outmoded
systems, including a model of apprenticeship in higher education that reinforces the
false assumption that professorship is the only meaningful career for humanities
doctoral recipients, does a tremendous disservice to all individuals and
organizations that benefit from humanistic perspectives. It is essential that
humanities programs begin to equip graduate students for varied career paths and deep
public engagement, while also emphasizing the value of working in a range of sectors
beyond the tenure track. Professorships should not be seen as the sole prestigious
career for humanists; instead, any intellectually rewarding role that contributes to
society should be seen as a tremendously successful outcome. The time is ripe for
prestige to be measured not only by tenure track placement rates, but also through
the many other careers that graduates choose to pursue, and ways that those paths
positively benefit the broader ecosystem of our shared cultural heritage.

Notes

[1] Findings from SCI’s study indicate
that upon starting graduate school, 74% of respondents expected to pursue a career
in the professoriate. For more details, see Figure
3.

[2] I contributed to the development of the Praxis
Network as part of my role with SCI.

[3]
Unfortunately, I cannot compare the employment rates of different types of
graduate programs. Most graduate programs do not track their graduates’ employment
paths. Those that do some form of tracking often include information about the
graduates who go on to tenure-track faculty careers. With funding from the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council of Graduate
Schools recently conducted a study to determine the feasibility of tracking career
pathways across multiple disciplines. The project report from that study was
released in December 2014 [Council of Graduate Schools 2014].